In memoriam: John Rawls. (Scan).(Obituary)

Conservatives the world over can breathe a little easier: On November 24, at age 81, Harvard philosopher John Rawls ran out of primary goods.

If you chuckled knowingly at the above reference, you are deserving of pity, for at some time you have muddled through one of the world's most infamously dry works of philosophy. Yet even if you never laid eyes on Rawls' 1971 A Theory of Justice, you have experienced its effects, for you have heard its tenets parroted in Congress and felt them in the lightness of your wallet. While Rawls' intellectual prowess was undeniable, he beats out even the likes of Richard Rorty for the dubious honor of having wrought the most pernicious influence on the past half-century of American political discourse.

Rawls' career began well enough, launched by his 1951 "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics," in which he enumerated a variety of characteristics the ideal judge of moral questions would possess. Since a person exhibiting those characteristics is most likely to judge rightly in individual cases, the moral principles that best fit that individual's judgments also stand a good chance of being right. Rawls suggested that once these judgments and principles are adjusted and combined into a coherent system, the resulting "reflective equilibrium" will be a reasonably good approximation of the moral code that governs us.

Such a procedure, while not uncontroversial, is certainly plausible, but somewhere in the two decades leading to A Theory of Justice, Rawls made three serious mistakes. First, he held that this decision procedure constitutes moral truth. Not only does Rawls' ideal judge reliably observe moral truth, but moral principles are true precisely because the judge selects them as correct. Second, he ...